After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Hidden History of Garden Gnomes

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Garden gnomes have a secret life all of their own. If you don't believe us, then go ask Paris Hilton.Today we discover the hidden history of garden gnomes and meet the eccentric aristocrat - Sir Charles Isham - who firmly believed that the mountains of the world really filled with little folk with pointy red hats and pickaxes.Our guest is Twigs Way author of Garden Gnomes: A History.Edited by Tomos Delargy, Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ 

Ancient folklore has it that among the small people of the world there was one group who were given charge of everything under the ground. They had the power to transform rocks from one kind to another, creating granite, limestone, quartz, gems. Their tiny lights were glimpsed in the darkest of minds. They are the gnomes, and if you listen carefully, you can hear them even now. Sparks fly as pickaxes strike crystal walls. Beards bob up and down. Red hats totter on heads. Outside the sun is shining among the flowers of an English garden. More gnomes are gathered, some taking their lunch or a cool drink. But wait. Shh! Quiet now, gnomes.

Here he comes across the lawn, his beard as white as his sun hat. Oh, Sir Charles Isham. He looms down to peer at the miniature figures like the moon bending down to earth. He smiles at the picturesque scene he has created, then pauses, looks again. He could swear these gnomes have been moving. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddy. And I'm Anthony. And today we are talking about garden gnomes. Wait, don't go. This is not necessarily the history you would expect. This is a history of spiritualism. It's a history of tourism

and kitsch holiday presents. It's a history of gardening and it's a history of one man and one garden in particular, the inventor, the maverick that was Sir Charles Isham. Anthony, before we get into the history of garden gnomes and we introduce our brilliant guest for today, can I ask, do you own any garden gnomes? Do you have a garden, in fact? There is a garden. There are no garden gnomes, however. I'll say this. It's not as big a thing in Ireland, garden gnomes, as it is in the UK. So it's a bit of a foreign one to me. It's not something I know much about, to be honest. It's funny that you say you think garden gnomes are more present in the UK, because the only garden gnome I can think of in pop culture is the garden gnome that belongs to the dad in the French film Amelie that she steals

when he's lonely and sad and living a very small insular life and she sends it with a friend I think who's an air hostess all around the world and gets the air hostess to photograph it outside of I think the pyramids the Eiffel Tower, the Eiffel Tower, whatever. The Eiffel Tower wouldn't be that impressive, would it, if she's already in France? Our guest today, who I feel it's time to introduce, is the wonderful Twigs Way. Twigs is a garden historian. She's a writer of many books, including, it must be said, a book on garden gnomes. So Twigs, welcome to After Dark. Thank you for having me. For people who don't know, what exactly is a garden gnome? Oh well, yes, that is just... how long is this podcast? So if you ask people nowadays

what is a garden gnome, they are all fairly certain about things like it's quite small, it lives in the garden, it's, you know, usually made of resin, sometimes pottery still. And they usually talk about a white beard and a pointy hat that's usually green nowadays, actually. Usually nowadays, people will start kind of talking about naughty gnomes and adjacent flamingos and all sorts of other, you know, small, strange accoutrements of the garden. But in fact, historically, they had a much narrower definition than we do now in many ways. Basically, I would just describe them as small, colourful statues. And I use the statue word deliberately that we have in our gardens. And that really sums it up. Just think of them as

another form of statue. So we're going to go to one particular garden, the garden of Sir Charles Isham. It's a 19th century garden. Now, do garden gnomes have a history that begins in the 19th century? We've heard from Anthony at the beginning of this episode that they have a folkloric element and they are thought to be real beings and these little statues maybe represent them. How far back does this history of physical object gnomes go? Well, as a gnome, we're really talking the 19th century and we are talking, you know, Sir Charles Isham's garden in many ways. But don't forget, they actually come over in terms of small figurines. They actually originate both in Germany, where they're called dwarfs rather than gnomes. So they actually change their kind of nomenclature, they change their title, as they literally cross the border. They're sold as dwarfs, small painted terracotta dwarfs in Germany. But as soon as they

sort of cross the border into England, we call them gnomes. Even if later on, they're part of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and you bought all of the Seven Dwarfs, and you bought Snow White, as soon as you put them in the garden, we start calling them garden gnomes. So we've got this kind of strange duality to them. So that kind of form that's coming over as dwarfs from Germany, handmade, very expensively, does come over in the mid-19th century mainly. But they in turn are based on earlier carved wooden dwarfs in the middle of Germany, the kind of mid- area around Bavaria. And they themselves have a folkloric element. So they're based on what were believed to be real little folk who, and I loved Anthony's kind of, you can still hear them down the mines, because that's what they were

based on. They were based on little folk that were meant to help down the mines. That's why you've got a pointy hat. It means that you've got early warning if your shaft is kind of bowing. So your little pointy hat would have a pad in the top of it as a kind of safety helmet. It's interesting that they are workers, that they're depicted as workers, miners. And later on, we'll see in Charles Isham's iteration of the gnome, they do various different jobs. And there's something there about the working class in the 19th century, which I think we can get into. Who is Charles Isham? I think it's time to introduce him to our listeners. The big reveal of Charles Isham, I always introduce him when I'm giving a talk as the most unlikely aristocrat

that you could possibly imagine of the mid-19th century. He is the owner or inherited of Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, his family seat. But he wasn't the normal country landowner of the time. And in a way, he was a bit of an unfortunate man to be the first to introduce gnomes because it's been very hard to take them seriously ever since. Sir Charles was a vegetarian, very unusual in those days. He was anti-hunting, which didn't go down well with the country community. He was a spiritualist. He believed very firmly in spiritualism, as we'll talk about. He was a teetotaler as well, which is a very interesting one to remember when you look at some of his writings, which are all to do with seeing things in the garden and how seeing little

folk and particularly dwarves and gnomes is what he called an extension of our faculties. And I think at this point, we should firmly remember that he was teetotal. So in all of those kind of ways, he really didn't fit in with the rest of the country house set. So what was it exactly then that made him go from this maverick slightly in his own class system at the time, let's say, to then placing some garden gnomes in a rockery. What was that link for him? Well, the link, I guess, was one of the things he did have in common with a lot of the upper classes at the time, and indeed a lot of other people who could afford it, was a fascination with alpine planting and alpine horticulture. So this is a period when a lot of people,

a lot of people who can afford it, upper middle classes, upper classes, are traveling to Switzerland, traveling to Germany, you know, going on alpine walks, the kind of, you know, tour of the old tour of Italy that people used to do around the classic sites has kind of fallen out of favour for various reasons. And we're all into going for healthy alpine walks. On those healthy alpine walks, you get involved in alpine botany. And this becomes a huge fashion of the period. And Sir Charles Isham and another gentleman who also took up Nome, Sir Frank Criss, become very involved in that alpine horticulture. I mean, we're really not thinking of kind of small suburban gardens with, you know, little rocks. You know, forget anything that was in your grandparents' garden as a kind of small clinker rockery and a collection of, you know, bits and pieces.

We are talking rockeries that take up, you know, areas about 30, 40 metres in length by 20 metres high. In the case of Sir Frank Crisp, you know, it was simply measured in acres. And you would paint the top of your little rockery in white so that it looked like the Matterhorn, for example. And Sir Charles Isham, who had collected together a series of little porcelain figures, whether he initially called them dwarves or gnomes, we don't know, when he first bought them. And these were originally placed inside his house. And we know that from something he mentions, because he said they were used as dinner card holders, matchbox holders, you know, all of these little porcelain figures that he'd bought. And he must have looked at them one day and thought to himself,

well, do you know, if you put these in the rockery, not only would they be back in their natural environment of rockiness, but they would also make my rockery look even bigger than it is because there are lots of little figures. And so, lo and behold, out he goes onto the rockery with some porcelain figures. And we know that some of those early porcelain figures, they really had just been used on the dining table and, you know, putting glass cases around the living room, so to speak. Though his later ones are purpose-made garden gnomes. So we've got a trade in Germany by then, he's bringing in purpose-made garden gnomes.

So that's how it happened, literally. A coincidence of Alpine horticulture and a love of folklore and a belief in little folk. So one of our favourite pastimes on After Dark is for us to describe an image that relates to the topic we're talking about. So I know you won't necessarily have this image in front of you, but I think you might be quite familiar with it. Maddy, I'm going to pass over to you as our resident art historian. We have two pictures of Items Gnomes. Give us a little insight into what's happening in both of these images. Okay, so image number one is a photograph, obviously a black and white photograph being in the, I presume, the late 19th century this has been taken. There's a rocky outcrop and sort of

landscape in the foreground. There are three garden gnomes, all in working clothes. They've got little trousers and boots on and what I assume are white shirts. Maybe they're painted some bright colours. One's got his hands in his pockets. Another one's standing with his hands on his hips. And one is sitting down having a rest. And all around them are the tools of the work they're doing. So there's some spades to one side. there are upturned wheel barrows that have been discarded by these gnomes who have stopped work. And in the centre of the image, there's a little ladder, and there's a post with a big sign that they've obviously climbed up the ladder and erected. And on the sign, it says eight hours sleep eight hours play eight hours work eight shillings pay which I

absolutely love and I think that's quite good wellness advice in terms of the eight hours sleep the eight hours play and the eight hours work that's always the advice that you hear isn't it the next photo is a similar scene it's another part of the rockery of course and we've got the gnomes here there's oh gosh one two three four five six seven eight I can see the gnomes here. There's, oh gosh, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I can see eight gnomes. There may be more hidden in there somewhere, and they look like they're engaged in mining or quarrying rock. Loads of them have got pickaxes. They're very, very much the dwarves from Snow White. There's one that's climbed up a little ladder. There's others sitting around having their lunch, I guess.

And it's a really quaint scene. And the way that Aisham has arranged these, there is something really captivating about them. You get a sense of liveliness. You can see why this would be fun and appealing for people coming to visit the garden. How does Maddy's description match up twigs? How does that sit with what Aishan was

trying to achieve? Does that ring true to you that these were the little scenes that he was trying to create? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he's making these scenarios, these scenes. So he's not just dotting them around. So as the popularity of garden gnomes increases in this country, we do sometimes have them just dotted around. But actually, early photographs of garden gnomes, both at Lamport Hall Rockery, but also at some other fairly upper class gardens as they were then, because they were quite expensive when they first came in. You know, they are making them into little scenes. There's another site where they're playing bowls. And it's almost the same as, or you did see more than you see now,

in suburban gardens where one will be fishing and the other one is, you know, playing cards around a toadstool and that kind of thing. And so they're making little scenes with them. But I think Aisham perhaps more than others is having them involved in what he thinks they are traditionally doing. He's kind of almost capturing them, a still of what he feels he would see them naturally doing. And that is the difference between what he's doing and what other people are doing with the gnomes. I suppose one of the key elements of gnomes, whether they're folkloric creatures or these little porcelain figures or wooden figures, is the fact that they're meant to be mischievous. And there's this playing around of liveliness and them being inanimate objects. The idea that they're moving just out of your

line of vision. And if you look at them, they'll suddenly freeze a bit like the toys in, I don't know, Toy Story or something. There is actually a children's story about gnomes who do things when you don't look at them. And that was a familiar children's thing. Children would go out into the garden, you know, and move gnomes around. Or the adults would do them for them and say, oh, look, the gnomes have moved since yesterday. Well, people do that with Elf on the Shelf now at Christmas time, don't they? So it's an ongoing tradition. But for Charles Isham, we know that he's a spiritualist. I think I read somewhere that he believed he was getting letters from a being on Jupiter or something like that.

So he's very much open to these ideas that the world is not quite how it seems. For him, are the gnomes real? He says of gnomes in general, as dwarves, in the quote, he's calling them dwarves. He said that if there weren't such a real folk as dwarves, weren't such a real folk as dwarfs, he would not have put his little figures on the rockery. He said this is only because he firmly believes, and he writes a lovely little pamphlet called Notes on Gnomes and Remarks on Rock Gardens. And then if you flip it over, it's beautiful. It's like somebody's school book from the 1970s, where you've done all kind of crazy writing over the back and fronts at least i did you know and if you flick it over it actually has a big title remarks on rock gardens and notes on gnomes anyway and in that he says if there was if i did not believe that there were such things as gnomes

and dwarves and that they have been well documented down mines and in miners cottages i would not have put a representation of them on my rockery and he says there is enough evidence now and i'm going to quote this he says seeing such things is no longer an indication of mental delusion, you know, in today's world, but rather an extension of faculty. So he really firmly believes in them. That's quite interesting if we are to take into consideration his belief in spiritualism and the spiritual world, right? Yes, yes. I mean, this is where it's coming from. So his attitude towards these is different to the attitude of the vast majority of people who will then go on, even in the couple of decades following Isham, people like, I've already mentioned Sir Frank Crisp, for example, you know, who will put gnomes not even necessarily

on their rockery, but on their lawn or around their pond or whatever. But for Isham, it is that they are representations of what he firmly believes are real figures of real little beings. We've touched upon Isham's belief systems there when you're talking about the gnomes and that he thinks that potentially they are beings. How does that link to his involvement in the world of spiritualism then? Because he's not just somebody who's passively involved in this, is he? He's actively on the ground, really trying to push for this belief in other worlds, another world, other beings that are around us. But you talked earlier about this idea of being able to perceive those things. He thought that was key. So I'm just trying to get a mind frame that this man is coming to gnomes and everything else in his life with. Yes, I think that he's very embedded in that world and quite early on. So that world of spiritualism, that world of mesmerism, as early as

1850s, he's becoming involved in. So he defends one of the people that comes over from America, a spiritualist medium, who is championed by Charles Isham. And then by the 1870s, he's actually on the Council of the British National Association of Spiritualists when it's established in 1873. Alongside, by the way, its members included people like Sir Arthur Colin Doyle, of course, who was famously a believer in spiritualism. And he also writes the Spiritualist Journal and he writes on mesmerism. So healing by hand and will, he writes in 1862. So he is absolutely embedded in that. It's not just on the fringes of spiritualism he firmly believes in communicating with other worlds the power of mesmerism as he says by hand and by will

so he's got this quite early on in his life and this is running side by side whilst he's developing the rock garden and whilst he's putting gnomes on it. You know, they don't follow one from the other necessarily. He's doing it at the same time. And we know that because we know when the gnomes came onto the rockery. And we have them actually reported on in things like the Gardener's Chronicle, for example, when they talk about the rockery in the 1870s, at the high point of his spiritualism. Just as a follow up question, then, did that cause him any reputational damage? Because we know with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, that did call into question in some

quarters what he was doing with his spiritualism. Did the same happen for Isham? I think, to be honest, with Isham, he was probably so far out of the norm for most of the country landowners at the time, that it probably wasn't going to cause any further issues. I think probably the answer is no. He was already eccentric enough. Yeah, how much eccentricism can you actually add? When I say he was eccentric, though, he was very well regarded amongst the horticultural community. I mean, he really did very good work on alpine planting and horticulture. That rock garden was reported on with or without gnomes through the 1870s and into the 1890s. And Lamport Hall itself and its gardens, you know, reported in Country Life when it first comes. So the gnomes gradually become less and less praised

through the kind of gardening periodicals. They obviously fall out of favour and gnomes generally actually take a complete slide by the beginning of the 20th century. I wonder if one of the reasons for the gnomes being discounted by this community is because they are quite kitsch and they are collectible items that anyone presumably at the end of the 19th century can buy if they go to places like Germany and Switzerland that they've become mass-produced and that they are affordable and therefore they're not exclusive or elevated elements of a garden design. not exclusive or elevated elements of a garden design. That happens quite late on.

So by the time we're in the first decade of the 20th century, we're still talking largely hand-produced, hand-moulded, hand-painted terracotta gnomes from a fairly restricted location in Germany. So the real fall in price and the real kind of association with kitsch doesn't come until certainly late interwar period when they're more mass produced. It's when we sort of cut ties with the hand produced, hand painted ones from Germany that they sort of tumble down the social ladder, so to speak. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII,

who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The year is 2005. iPods are the must-have item. Kanye West is blowing up. And YouTube is now a thing. More importantly for our story though, the gnome liberation front have been building up to something big. And then, in the spring, before anyone expects it, they strike. Marianne Seveson of Redmond in Washington

opened the door of her mobile home to find a ring binder there. When she opened it, she found it filled with photographs of her beloved, hand-painted Garden Gnome. It was posed with an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas, relaxing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, being held by a waitress in a Hooters bar where it was, according to Marianne, appearing to have the time of its life. Next to the ring binder was a copy of People magazine, with a post-it note reading, Open me.

It opened on a page showing a picture of socialite and TV star of the moment, Paris Hilton. In one hand was her iconic chihuahua. In the other hand was Marianne's sleepy little gnome. Chihuahua. In the other hand was Marianne's sleepy little gnome. Anthony, what were you doing in 2005? Did you have an iPod? I had an iPod. I was very fancy. No, I wanted to be different so I got a Sony one. Look how that turned out for me. You were a cool kid. Yeah, I had my dad's old 1980s Walkman and then I graduated to a purple iPod and I thought I was the bee's knees. The bee's knees.

But it wasn't Kanye West on there, it was Shania Twain all the way. This gnome story is making me think of the Amelie film again. A gnome on its journey, this idea of it being animated, of it picking up and taking off and going across the world. I love this. And I love that it's gone to Las Vegas because where else would a gnome go? Twigs, the Gnome Liberation

Front. What is this? Why does it appear? Well, Gnome Laughing actually, I mean, good old Gnome Liberation Front, but Gnome Laughing dates back to the 1980s. And now you're going to have to look up. I mean, that was Sony Walkman's. Okay, you're not just that you're not going to have to look this up. I can tell you it was Sony Walkman's. It was an iPod. I wasn't there for that. No, absolutely. So they claim that one of the earliest gnome knapping incidents was in mid 1980s in Australia. In fact, I mean, it has to be, doesn't it? If it wasn't going to be Las Vegas, it had to be Australia. And similarly, again, somebody else's gnome takes it away on holiday, and in this case,

apparently returned it with having used some kind of brown polish on its face to give it a suntan. You would have thought an Australian garden gnome has sufficient suntan, but there you are. So and ever since then, gnome napping kind of bubbled under, so to speak. So as you say, the 2001 Amelie film, where she gets an air hostess friend to fly it around the world. And it's just this idea of liberating the gnomes from where they are. And they've variously been put on places, you know, like roundabouts, people have collected all the gnomes from a town and put them on a, you know, out of town roundabout. But yes, so liberating the gnomes from their kind of static scene in a garden. I'm sure Charles Isham would actually approve of that.

Yeah, I was gonna say it speaks back to Isham's interest in workers' rights and making these little jokes about the gnomes with their eight hours of work and play, you know, life balance. Annually. Eight shillings a day. Yeah, exactly. Yes, it seems to be a continuation of that. And it's interesting that it comes in in the 80s and 90s, actually, particularly in Britain, thinking about the miners' strikes and a real focus on the working class and working conditions as well. And it's maybe happening not as potentially a direct result of that, but certainly in that climate, in that culture of thinking more about mining and workers in that context.

I don't know how, well, I suppose people do think about them as miners. Yeah, so many gnomes that, particularly in the 80s, you were still getting that hangover of your gnome looked like something that would come out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves rather than looking like the traditional gnome, which is modelled on, you know, a fairly rugged looking miner, a realistic looking little folk. from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which we still have that kind of appearance in gnomes if you go down to a garden centre today. It's all kind of very, you know, infantilised, you know, chubby-cheeked, bulbous nose, that kind of thing.

Twigs, before we go, I'd be really interested to, if we could just leave Charles Isham behind just for a second, I'd love to know your opinion as a garden historian about why people now are intrigued by garden gnomes as an ornament even why what is it about the garden gnome that people want to have in their suburban front gardens what is that well it's really strange you should ask that because every few years i get phoned up by a rush of you know newscasters or whatever and I'm suddenly confronted

with the question you know the latest statistics are that 85% of people now hate garden gnomes and wouldn't dream of having one and sales have gone right down and so I'll answer the questions about that and talk about the history of garden gnomes and then literally it'll be on a cycle I would say of anything between three and five years I will then get phoned up by people who say wow garden gnome sales have gone through the roof everybody wants a garden gnome what is it about garden gnomes they are so cyclical in terms of love and hate I don't know whether it's a generational thing. Certainly in the 90s, when we were talking about was this connecting to working classes and a minor strike and things like that. In the 90s and early 2000s, there were a lot of advertisements that make use of gnomes. Now, if you can think

back, and we probably are, we're not quite as far back as the 90s. But you know, Amelie and the Travelocity gnome, does anybody and the Travelocity Gnome. Does anybody remember the Travelocity Gnome? Some of your listeners will remember the Travelocity Gnome from the early years of the Internet. And that was used to advertise travel. Basically, the gnome popped up everywhere. So it was like a meeting of the early Internet, advertisements, travel and gnome napping all kind of wrapped up. internet, advertisements, travel and gnome napping all kind of wrapped up. And then Bowdoin Clothing,

who are still around, they used gnomes for a couple of seasons as well as a sort of kitsch way into advertising clothing. Yes, they used to have them in their window displays. They did. I remember this. Adopt a gnome. Adopt a Bowdoin gnome, it was. And at the same time, adopt a Bowdoin gnome it was and at the same time I mean even things like fire trap clothing which it was a lot more edgy than Bowdoin sorry Bowdoin but you know they had a kind of a range of gnomes dressed in kind of ninja clothing or you know entirely black with grids around their faces and stuff like that really dramatic gnomes So the gnomes kind of come to be used in all sorts of different ways, not just the traditional gnome. And we probably shouldn't get into naughty gnomes, which arrived in the 1990s. Up until then, gnomes really kept their clothes on. Now there is just no stopping them. So they've been used in all sorts of ways in advertising as well. And I

think that means that they reinvent themselves, they change. I'm talking as though they're real little folk. Ah, they've got to me. So yeah, they kind of reinvent themselves all the time. Here we are, these helpful mining figures. And here we are, mischievous dwarves. And now here we are being kind of kitsch friendly, doing the gardening, raking up. I don't know if you've noticed, but all those mining tools promptly became gardening tools, of course. So that's why they've got rakes and shovels and wheelbarrows, because they started off in mines. Whereas now, God knows what they've got in their hands nowadays. They're just reinventing themselves all the time. And I think this accounts for the way they kind of go in and out of fashion as we reinvent them.

I can't wait to see what they do next. Twigs, finally, before we go, I can't speak to a garden historian whose name is Twigs and not ask, was that nominative determinism? Did you always want to be a garden historian? No, I'm going to to really disappoint you I used to be an archaeologist and then I got into landscape archaeology and then I kind of drifted so to speak and and ended up in what was called garden history really but nowadays we really call it the history of designed landscapes and gardens but I always wonder with people like Bob Flowerdew and Pippa Greenwood, did Bob Flowerdew really want to be,

I don't know, a civil engineer or something like that? And they just wouldn't take him seriously? I don't think so. You know, it's a nice thought, isn't it? It certainly is. Thank you so much, Twigs. And thank you everyone for listening to this episode of After Dark.

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